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logo the BaCon language

Page partially updated March 15, 2011. Note that Wary Puppy has correct mime handling for BaCon and editor with syntax highlighting
BaCon is a structured-BASIC programming language. BASIC is sooo old! With so many cool new languages around these days, why my interest in BaCon? Ah, very good question, read on...

Introduction

BaCon is developed by Peter van Eerten. What he wanted was a programming language that is very easy to learn and use, and he chose structured BASIC, which is the second-generation BASIC as explained in the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_programming_language

Probably the best place to get an overview of BaCon is to browse through Peter's BaCon home page:
http://www.basic-converter.org/

I also recommend reading the official documentation:
http://www.basic-converter.org/documentation.html

One of the things that makes BaCon particularly interesting to me is the Highlevel Universal GUI (HUG):
http://www.basic-converter.org/hug.txt

BaCon in Puppy

Recent puppies have BaCon "builtin". That is, the "devx" SFS file, which is our combo-pack with everything you need for compiling applications, now has the BaCon compiler, and lots of documentation and support files.

Read this page to find out about SFS files and how to install them:
http://puppylinux.com/development/package-management.htm

Read this page to find out more about setting up your Puppy for compiling applications:
http://puppylinux.com/development/compileapps.htm

Wary Puppy, my long-term supported retro-Puppy, will usually have the latest version of BaCon, as this is the Puppy that I normally use on a daily basis. Find out more about Wary:
http://bkhome.org/wary/
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewCat=Wary

mime
Puppy does not just have the compiler, there is also the NicoEdit text editor with color syntax highlighting for BaCon, plus mime-handling is setup to recognise BaCon .bac files as text/x-bacon. The ROX-Filer file manager will display BaCon files with the image shown alongside, and open the file in NicoEdit if clicked on.

The guy who introduced me to BaCon is forum member 'vovchik'. He started a thread on the Puppy Linux forum to discuss BaCon usage in Puppy:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=48901

My BaCon tutorials

These are not rigorous tutorials, just my playing around:
Getting started
My first GTK application
Internationalization
Consistent GUI layout



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